Note: From Losing Our Religion (Sentinel 2023). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
Two words filled me with rage: Jesus Saves. On January 6, 2021, the president of the United States assembled a mob in Washington – promising a “wild” time – and told them to march to the Capitol in order to halt the constitutional process for the United States Congress to certify a presidential election the president insisted, falsely, had been stolen from him. The mob tore through barricades, broke through windows and doors, beat police officers with flagpoles and fire extinguishers. Some chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as others constructed a makeshift gallows in order to do just that – believing the vice president of the United States to be a traitor based on what President Trump had just told them, that Pence had the power to unilaterally overturn the election. American flags were thrown down and replaced with Trump and Confederate flags. Congressional leaders hid while the doors buckled from mobs seeking to attack them.
And there, held aloft over the churning horde of people, was a sign – “Jesus Saves.” That the two messages, a gallows and “Jesus Saves,” could coexist is a sign of crisis for American Christianity.
Too Many Evangelical Leaders Were Complicit – and Not Just in Insurrection
Some dismissed the Christian symbolism at the insurrection – not only the signs but also the prayers “in Jesus’ name” right next to a horn-wearing pagan shaman in the well of the evacuated United States Senate among many other things. And yet, the January 6 rally-turned-riot was preceded in the days before it by the “Jericho March,” at which Christian musicians played worship songs while well-known evangelical speakers repeated the same falsehoods that led to the violence – that the election was stolen, and that this was a moment of “spiritual warfare.”…
If this were limited to threats on American democracy, the situation would be dire enough, but church after church is divided over conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Some of them are related to politics, but many aren’t. Journalist Tim Alberta chronicled the ways that some pastors have leveraged the political fixations and extremist positions of the present moment to build churches, leaving other pastors – those who went into the ministry for reasons quite distant from politics and showmanship – “feeling trapped.” [“How Politics Poisoned the Church,” The Atlantic, p. 33]….
The irony of the present crisis is that evangelical Christians in the United States have viewed ourselves as those who hold to “objective truth” over and against a kind of deconstructionist relativism. We came out of the fundamentalist side of the controversies over biblical authority in the mainline Protestant denominations of the fractious 1920s, and the concept of the truthfulness of the Bible implies the existence of actual “truth” – objective realities that are not merely generated by a community.
Ruth Graham at the New York Times observed that the American evangelical drive toward conspiracy theory and propaganda was at least partially fueled by the global COVID-19 pandemic in which people were disconnected from their actual embodied church communities and regularly both consumed information and found alternative “communities” online. After the lockdowns were over, and people began to return to church, the divisions and arguments – whether over public health or politics or race in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder – showed that many evangelicals were radicalized, and that many Christians did not have a common set of “facts” or a common concept of “truth” with which to adjudicate these controversies. She is partially right, though the pandemic (and the 2016 and 2020 elections) accelerated these trends but did not create them….
Demanding a King in a Place of Confusion
Where does this eclipse of truth lead? Actually, the path is not toward the anarchy of “follow your heart,” at least not in the long run. “In those days there was no king in Israel,” the book of Judges tells us. “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). In the short term, this led to chaos and disorder, but the chaos and disorder led ultimately to the clamoring for a “king over us” so that “we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles” (I Samuel 8:19–20). And here we are. The political scientist Jonathan Rauch argues that what’s at stake in this hour is not just the diminishment of facts, but something he calls the “constitution of knowledge,” the most basic commonality of truth required for life together. And one plank of that “constitution” is the principle of “no personal authority.” [The Constitution of Knowledge,p. 89–92]
Obviously, I disagree with Rauch, an atheist, about the ultimate application of this principle since I believe in the personal authority of Jesus of Nazareth. When he says, “But I say unto you….” I go with him. But that’s because I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is not just a teacher or a guru, but the Son of God, the Word made flesh, the one in whom the entire cosmos holds together. But Rauch is right when it comes to merely human authority. Without at least some common standard of basic truth, life together – whether in a neighborhood, a church, or a nation – is impossible. Questions become not about what is true or false, but rather how to prove that one is really in one’s tribe. When the claims of an individual or a group cannot be questioned without the possibility of exile, and when exile becomes the worst fate imaginable, we are in a place of confusion. Such confusion evaporates the reasons why, for instance, we want doctors to rely on studies and data before treating illnesses rather than, “Well, my Aunt Flossie chewed a little bit of rat poison every morning and she never got dementia, so….”
Authority vs. Authoritarianism
Demagogues and authoritarians know that a “post-truth” environment is precisely where they will thrive. What’s especially concerning is the rate at which strongmen and authoritarians – in North America and around the world – count on the support of evangelical Christians. In some ways, as with other aspects of this moment, it might be that many evangelical Christians don’t recognize authoritarianism because the petri dish for authoritarian experiments has often been evangelical churches.
When we see example after example of bullying, intimidating leaders in such high-profile positions in evangelical Christianity, the question is often posed, “Why do people flock to this, and why do they put up with it?” Such people are often told they are looking for authority and will find it wherever they can get it. There’s a certain sense in which that’s accurate, but a much larger sense in which it is not. The draw to authoritarianism (of various kinds – Left and Right, theistic and atheistic) is not actually because people want authority but because they do not.
The relationship between authority and authoritarianism, after all, is not a matter of taking legitimate authority and multiplying it any more than polytheism is just more monotheism or polyamory is just more monogamy. The worship of many gods is a repudiation and a contradiction of the worship of one God. Sex with multiple partners is a repudiation and a contradiction of marital love. And authoritarianism – whether in a national or global movement or within the small places of a church or a family dinner table – is a repudiation and contradiction of authority.
REQUIRED: Excerpted from Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore, in agreement with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Russell Moore, 2023.
Russell Moore, editor-in-chief, Christianity Today
